Boffins at the University of Cambridge say they've packed the equivalent of three tonnes of magnetic force into a superconducting material roughly the size of a golf ball.
In what they call a “trapped field” experiment, the university says its researchers managed to cram a 17.6 Tesla magnetic field into the brittle “high …

Cambridge University boffins have begun exploring an alternative to the traditional polygraph approach to detecting liars and cheats.
Instead of calculating variations in a person's respiration, pulse and sweat production, the fib-detecting tech looks at the subject's body movements. As a first stage in investigating the …

Video
The first hydrocarbon/electric aircraft has taken to the skies over Southern England as part of trials to find out if such combo systems have a place in aviation's future.
Youtube Video
The aircraft, a heavily modified microlight, uses a conventional four-stroke petrol engine as its main power source and an electric motor …

World Solar Challenge
Cambridge University Eco Racing (CUER), Britain's sole entrant in the trans-continental World Solar Challenge starting tomorrow in Australia, has withdrawn its “Resolution” vehicle from the race.
CUER entered the race with an innovative design featuring tilting solar panels, the better to catch the maximum amount of solar energy …

World Solar Challenge
Next Sunday sees the starter's flag fall on the 2013 World Solar Challenge, and on the grid in Darwin will be Cambridge University Eco Racing's Resolution - a sleek carbon-fibre monocoque chassis solar-powered vehicle, featuring a "game-changing" solar tracking system.
Artist's rendering of Resolution in the Outback. Pic: …

Patient record supplier Cerner has written to Cambridge University Hospitals foundation trust over its recent award of a major software tender to Epic, Government Computing understands.
The letter, understood to be from Cerner's European managing director Alan Fowles to the trust's interim chief executive Dr Karen Castille, …

Scientists in China are celebrating another key discovery after unearthing the fossilised remains of a 520 million year-old arthropod, with what they claim is the earliest example of a nervous system extended beyond the head.
The prawn-like sea creature was found preserved sideways on, enabling Javier Ortega-Hernández and his …

Humanity's quest to discover intelligent aliens resident in other star systems has received a big boost from well-known Russian biz overlord Yuri Milner, who has splashed $100m on the search with the endorsement of famous boffin Stephen Hawking.
A project he calls Breakthrough Listen will give SETI researchers access to the …

Vacuum-maker James Dyson has plunged over a million pounds into funding engineering research at Cambridge University.
And he doesn't just want the funded boffins looking at vacuum cleaners. One of the billionaire's stipulations for the post is that it will encourage speculative research into areas that may not be commercially …

If you're looking for a bit of light reading this holiday season, Cambridge University is here to help: they've digitized and made available online over 4,000 pages of the pioneering scientist and mathemetician Sir Isaac Newton's most important works.
Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica title page
Principia title page …

Cambridge University has joined the ranks of terribly prestigious universities giving computer science classes away online, releasing a 12-step course teaching how to create what it calls a "basic terminal Operating System" for the Raspberry Pi.
To create the OS you’ll need YAGARTO Tools and YAGARTO GNU ARM, a Raspberry Pi (not …

Cambridge University has been involved in high performance computing for 18 years, starting with a “traditional” supercomputer, before a major restructuring eight years later led to what would now be considered high-performance computing (HPC).
We read much about how IT needs to become a profit not a cost center. Well, as part …

Boffins at Cambridge University want to set up a new centre to determine what humankind will do when ultra-intelligent machines like the Terminator or HAL pose "extinction-level" risks to our species.
A philosopher, a scientist and a software engineer are proposing the creation of a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER …

Boffins at Cambridge University have uncovered shortcomings in ATM security that might be abused to create a mechanism to clone chip-and-PIN cards.
The security shortcoming might already be known to criminals and creates an explanation for what might have happened in some, otherwise baffling, "phantom" withdrawal cases.
Each …

British inventor Andrew Fentem has come up with a way of cheaply turning fabric into large active displays.
Fentem, who pioneered multitouch input technology 15 years ago, only to see a UK quango squander the innovation and Apple reap the reward, calls the new display “organic pixels”.
He’s invented an ulta-thin magnetic …

Baidu has been shot in its liquid metal head for cheating in a standardised and independent Artificial Intelligence test.
Hosted by Stanford University's vision lab, the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) saw Baidu's algorithms compete alongside those from Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook's FART, among others …

Advances in the power of computers won't automatically make passwords obsolete, according to a top computer science researcher.
Joseph Bonneau, a postgrad researcher at Cambridge University, looked into the perceived wisdom that runs along these lines: "Since computers are getting exponentially faster, yet the human brain is …

BT and Cisco have landed a deal to provide VoIP connectivity to Cambridge University users, replacing their current telephone system which provides communications across 200 locations.
The move is motivated by the usual cost-reduction of using standard IP kit, though the university angle allows everyone involved to talk about …

The Metropolitan Police is to begin buying up to 30,000 body cameras, as part of its ambition to become "the most transparent police force in the world", The Register has learned.
Stephen Deakin, interim chief technology officer at the Met, told El Reg at the police tech provider TASER Summit: "We are accelerating the …

The government is flinging £15m at training "the next generation" of quantum engineers through investment in "skills hubs".
Implicitly suggesting the existence of a current generation of quantum engineers, the Department of BIS hopes the investment will support the building of "innovative new products like 6G smartphones."
As …

Computer scientists from Cambridge University have rebuffed attempts by a banking association to persuade them to take down a thesis covering the shortcomings of Chip-and-PIN as a payment verification method.
Omar Choudary's masters thesis contains too much information about how it might be possible to fool a retailing terminal …

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is ready to provide more scientific breakthroughs to the world after almost two years of slumber and months of recommissioning.
Particle-physics boffins tell us the new LHC experiments are "ready to take data at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV (trillion electron volts), almost double the …

A Cambridge physicist who revolutionized the concept of string theory has been tapped to succeed Steven Hawking in one of the world's most prestigious academic posts.
String theorist Michael Green will become Cambridge University's 18th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair has been held in its 340-some year history by …

Worstall on Wednesday
There was a certain amount of consumer resistance to my assertion that the Apple Christometer's $17,000 worth of bling was all about sex. But I'm afraid that this really is so. Bling is about getting sex: and it's the women who decide that it is as well.
We have a less than reputable source for this:
…conspicuous consumption …

Some people believe videogames affect a child’s physical and mental behaviour, while others will swear blind that they don’t. Now Cambridge University hopes to discover the truth and has created a department dedicated to studying the messages kids absorb from “cultural sources”.
The university’s Centre for Children's Literature …

Cambridge University students have indicated that they may, as is commonly believed, be a trifle out of touch with the mainstream of modern life. It appears that the uni's cheerleading team is known as the "Cambridge Cougars", despite the fact that its members are neither especially attractive nor old - and several are not even …

With congressional hearings due on Wednesday to discuss US government plans to force tech companies to install backdoors in their encryption systems, some of the leading minds in the security world have published a paper on how, and if, such a system would work.
The authors of the 34-page paper [PDF] read like a who's who of …

Cambridge boffins have discovered that thin films of silver nanoparticles can increase optical storage density and create multi-coloured holograms.
The effect was first noted way back in fourth century Roman times (circa 290-325 AD) with the crafting of the Lycurgus Cup, an engraved glass goblet that has a green tint when lit …

Video
The first trailer for Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything hints at a movie heavy on the romance and tragedy of the renowned physicist’s life.
Trailer for Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything
The film, based on Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, the memoir of Hawking’s first wife Jane Wilde, …

Traditionally, newspapers illustrate A-Level results day with pictures of attractive teens in mid-air.
But soon it could be lank-haired, bespectacled nerds that are performing the vault of victory following news that students are flocking to tech-focused courses.
Today is the day where pretty young things and their uglier, off- …

Stephen Hawking's successor at Cambridge University, Michael Green, and his fellow theorist John Schwarz at Caltech, have won the second Fundamental Physics Prize.
String theory pioneers Green, who became Lucasian professor of mathematics when Hawking stepped down in 2009, and Schwarz won the $3m prize for their work on quantum …

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the Intel Corporation, has donated $12.5 million out of his personal wealth to fund a library at Cambridge University. Cambridge is building a £45 million site and Moore's money will be used to help finance a science library, according to UK newspaper The Financial Times. Last year, Microsoft CEO …

Anon hackers have been caught boasting about defacing a counterfeit Yorkshire Bank website.
Hacktivist crew Anon Ghost earned coverage on underground security blogs for defacing “Yorkshire Bank, one of the largest United Kingdom bank (sic)”.
However, the hackers actually hit "ybs-bank.com", a Malaysian imitation of the real …

Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue.
The 3D Secure system - branded as either Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode - has become a ubiquitous extra line of security …

Geek's Guide to Britain
Say the the word “radio” and the mind goes to Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian emigrant whose work on the watershed of Cornwall and the Atlantic Ocean helped turn wireless into the defining medium of the early 20th Century.
But radio wasn’t invented by Marconi – or any one person. Rather, it was discovered, and the man who drove …

Cambridge Assessment, the non-profit exam marking offshoot of Cambridge University, has signed RM Plc to hook its freelance markers into a computerised assessment tool.
RM will be paid at least £21m over five years to install and manage the system, dealing with exam papers submitted by about eight million candidates in 150 …

After a stellar start to the World Solar Challenge, the fancied Nuon team from Delft has had to cop a ten minute penalty for breaking speed limits, while Japan's Tokai University entrant has been given a more serious 30 minute penalty.
The penalties will probably put Solar Team Twente (also from The Netherlands) in the lead at …

Page File
El Reg bookworm Mark Diston trawls through the freshest releases in publishing. This week we have a trippy new Murakami about a murderous librarian, a murder mystery to suit Downton Abbey fans and lastly, a pop-sci romp through computing history that soon takes a turn for the sci-fi...
The Strange Library
Haruki Murakami has …

The UK experienced its fifteenth hottest summer since 1910 this year, according to the latest Met Office figures, with the raging heat unsurpassed except in the years 1911, 1947, 1955 and eleven other years over the past century.
"People are not adapting their homes, particularly in cities, to make them cooler. For vulnerable …

World Solar Challenge
Fancied teams have been shaded by dark horse entries at the time trial prologue to the 2013 World Solar Challenge.
Professor John Storey, the event's Chief Scientist, told The Reg the USA's University of Michigan, Japan's Tokai University, Italy's Onda Solare and Sweden's Jönköping University as teams to watch. Yet None featured …

Hundreds of thousands of journal articles are to be made available to the public in Blighty's local libraries after a government consultation on how to expand access to publicly funded research.
The Access to Research Initiative is kicking off a two-year pilot programme today, after major publishers like the Nature Group, …

SPB
In 2011, The Reg's Special Projects Bureau followed the World Solar Challenge through the dead heart of Australia.
This year, we'll do it again. 2013's World Solar Challenge hits the road on October 6th and The Register's Vulture South team will hit the road too, tracking the racers from the top end through the never-never and …

Exclusive and updated
Intel is to close its UK research centre in Cambridge, The Register understands, just three and a half years after it was first opened. The move is part of the streamlining of the company outlined by CEO Paul Otellini earlier this year.
The lab was the first research centre Intel established outside the US, and is one of four …

The surrealist nightmare worm Hallucigenia, so-called because of its otherworldly appearance and apparent lack of place on the taxonomic ranks, has finally found its place in evolutionary history... and even appears to have some modern-day descendants.
Hallucigenia animation
Hallucigenia is one of the most bizarre-looking …

Those readers slumped behind their desks in the traditional pre-Xmas torpor and who are looking for an alternative to watching the clock hands crawling towards Yule liberation are directed towards "earth" - magnificent animated views of the world's wind currents.
Global wind currents shown on earth
Using data from the …

A company spun out of Cambridge University has raised $100m to start commercial production of its "plastic electronics".
Plastic Logic will open a factory in Dresden, Germany to produce electronic reader displays. The flexible screens claim 150 pixels per inch.
The cunning thing about the technology is that it effectively …

Physical production of a replica of EDSAC, aka the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, has at last begun at The National Museum of Computing, located at World War II crypto centre Bletchley Park. EDSAC is an early computer originally put together at Cambridge University in the late 1940s.
The initial work on the …

Boozy students hurl so much vomit about at Cambridge University that cleaners are now being immunised against Hepatitis, it has been revealed.
Contract cleaners at Gonville & Caius college get the jabs routinely, and staff there were said to be "furious" over a recent puking surge.
In fact, the spate of incidents actually …

The computer sciences department at Cambridge University has said it is "desperate" to attract more students to its courses, despite the fact that it currently turns down two applications in three.
The Guardian quotes Jack Lang, a lecturer at the Cambridge computer laboratory, as saying that:
"People seem to think computer …

Those of you who've ever wondered if the Alien assertion that "in space, nobody can hear you scream" has any scientific basis can now put it to the test, thanks to Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF).
In December, CUSF will be blasting a Google Android phone into orbit as part of the STRaND-1 nanosatellite payload. The plan …